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José, Costa Rica, Monday, Sept. 7, 2015, Vol. 16, No. 176
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 Ministerio
de Seguridad Pública
photo
Fuerza Pública officers rescued
these two
young owls from a tree inParrita after neighbors expressed concern that the parents had not been seen. The screech owl chicks were turned over to environmental officials for tending and eventual release. This year's book fair begins Sept. 18 By the A.M. Costa Rica staff
The 19th edition of the Feria Internacional del Libro begins Sept. 18 for a 10-day run. The book fair is a major cultural event each year in Costa Rica. This year, Central America will be the invited guests. Authors from El Salvador, Panamá, Nicaragua and Honduras will be featured. Once again the location will be the Antigua Aduana on Calle 23, which will be filled to capacity with booths of editorial houses and retail outlets. Although the bulk of the books are in Spanish, there are plenty of English books and activities to interest even the mono-lingual expat. The book fair is the way Costa Rica promotes its writers to the rest of the world. In addition to the Cámara Costarricense del Libro, the sponsor is the Ministerio de Cultura y Juventud. Costa Rica bug surprises U.S. inspectors Special to A.M. Costa Rica
with staff additions U.S. Customs and Border Protection agriculture specialists at Miami’s seaport intercepted an unusual pest identified as Hesus flaviventris
Although the bug was new to inspectors in Miami, the species is common in Central America. It has been collected in Panamá and Guatemala, according to online sources. The damage caused by Hesus flaviventris Burmeister is not clearly defined in the scientific literature, but stink bugs cause damage to a host of commercial crops, including corn. The stink bug feeds on the leaves and sometimes the fruit and causes spots that detract from the commercial value. Popular comedian leads in Guatemala By the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
A comedian could be Guatemala's next president. Jimmy Morales, a comedic actor and political novice, is leading the pack, according to early results. The top three are headed for a presidential runoff after Sunday's election in Guatemala. With about half of the votes counted, Morales has 26 percent of the ballots. His campaign slogan "not corrupt, not a thief" resonated with voters after a corruption scandal rocked Guatemala late last week, ending in the resignation of President Otto Pérez Molina. "I planted love in my homeland, and now I'm harvesting that love," Morales said Sunday after casting his vote. Conservative businessman Manuel Baldizon trailed Morales with 18 percent of the ballots, while former first lady Sandra Torres had 17 percent of the votes. Sunday's presidential, congressional and municipal elections were for a four-year term to begin in 2016. Until then, former Vice President Alejandro Maldonado will lead Guatemala. Hundreds of protesters called for the election to be delayed as they gathered at the Supreme Court building in Guatemala City where Pérez Molina appeared in court Thursday and Friday. Pérez Molina said in court he is innocent of accusations that he accepted $800,000 in an alleged bribery ring nicknamed The Line. The nickname references the special telephone line said to have been reserved for businessmen who allegedly paid bribes to officials to avoid import taxes. The former president said in court Friday that he accepted no bribes and bragged that he had been offered and refused 10 times that amount from fugitive drug trafficker Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzmán when the Mexican drug kingpin was captured in 1993. The ousted president's mention of Guzmán also served as a reminder that Pérez Molina had been behind the long-sought fugitive's arrest. Guzmán has since escaped from prison in Mexico by bribing prison officials. Pérez Molina has not yet been formally charged. He next appears in court on Tuesday. Thousands of Guatemalans filled the streets last week when news of the president's resignation spread. They had been protesting for months, demanding that he step down. Perez Molina was elected in 2011 on an anti-corruption pledge. Guatemala continues to be one of Latin America's most impoverished countries. |
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A.M. Costa Rica Third News Page |
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| San José, Costa Rica, Monday, Sept. 7, 2015, Vol. 16, No. 176 | |
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| Thieves seek out turtle eggs even in Parque Nacional Manuel
Antonio |
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By the A.M. Costa Rica staff
Turtle egg thieves don't respect the boundaries of Parque Nacional Manuel Antonio. Officers of the Servicio Nacional de Guardacostas said they encountered one man at Playa Rey in the park early Sunday and said that he carried a bag with 82 green turtle eggs. He was traveling on a bicycle. In addition, the officers said they found a bag that contained 87 more eggs that someone seems to have dropped to avoid detection by officers who were patrolling the area. The two bags of eggs were to be taken to a location in Quepos where they will be given a chance to hatch. At this time of year, several species of turtles are depositing their eggs on beaches in the country. Eating turtle eggs has been considered a bounty of the sea for centuries in Costa Rica, but officials try to emphasize that turtles are worth more for tourism than as food. |
 Servicio Nacional de Guardacostas photo
Turtle egg thief is in
handcuffs |
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| San José, Costa Rica, Monday, Sept. 7, 2015, Vol. 16, No. 176 | |||||
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| Proliferation of online cybercrooks blur line between spying
and stealing |
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By the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
To say that 2015 has so far been seeing new heights of corporate and government computer attacks, as well as an escalation in the sheer daring of those hacks, is to risk understatement. The list grows daily: 80 million health insurance records stolen from Anthem Insurance; 27 million private personnel records swiped from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management; the breach of unclassified systems and the White House, State Department, and Joint Chiefs of Staff, and on and on. Computer network security professionals have been left scrambling just to fix the hacks that have already happened, let alone prevent new attacks. The situation is so dire that some analysts said they worry the good guys might never catch up. These attacks, of course, occur for a wide range of reasons: hunting for credit cards, governments spying on adversaries, or hacktivists trying to make a statement. Yet as distinct as the reasons and actors may be, some security analysts increasingly worry about a new trend of groups and attacks that are trying to blur the traditional lines between crime and espionage. And that, they say, is only going to make preventing future attacks all the more difficult. When cybersecurity analysts talk about the Internet, they tend to use phrases like threat field or threat space, meaning the entire range of threats that any given group, corporation or government might face online. Different targets have widely varying threat fields. For example, an aerospace firm working on classified military projects will have a very different threat space from that of a large consumer retailer like giant retailer Target, which in turn would have a different threat space than a small political activist group. “Groups conducting cyberattacks may use similar tactics, like spear-phishing, but they’re very different, both in nature and in motivations,” says Patrick McBride, vice president of communications at iSight Partners, one of the largest U.S. cyber-threat intelligence firms. “The starting point is the difference between information and intelligence.” McBride says it isn’t enough for government or corporate security officials to build strong cyber defenses around their systems to fend off future hacks. They have to understand the threats unique to their enterprise, and that means understanding the opponents they face and their motivations. “The bad guys are the competition,” he said. “You need to head into this as you would against any adversary, with knowledge about what they do and have a strategic plan to fight back.” In both the cyber and military spheres, analysts often draw a distinction between information and intelligence. “Information is raw and unfiltered,” McBride said. “It’s unevaluated when it’s delivered, it’s pulled from every source, there could be truth in there or falsehoods, it may not necessarily be relevant. Intelligence is processed and sorted information. Someone actually has to sort through the noise to establish the truth.” For cybersecurity analysts, this is key. Learning of a new hack on their computer network and when it happened is information, but discerning who was responsible and what their goals are is intelligence that can help prevent a future attack. This becomes even more important when analysts consider the types of hackers that usually target specific government agencies or corporations with large amounts of secret data. “These are persistent threats that don’t give up, and are always refining new techniques of how to breach your system,” said McBride. “A lot of the nation states that we monitor, or at least the actors that appear connected to those |
nation
states, they’re utilizing new techniques and tools in far-flung regions
or more obscure places and refining them before they show up at your
doorstep.” There’s another important intelligence distinction: the difference between crime and spying. “Cyber criminals and hacktivists are looking for financial gain pretty much, or to make a statement,” says Sarah Hawley, a member of iSight’s cyber espionage team. “Those conducting cyber espionage are looking for bodies of information that gives them a strategic advantage over their adversary. They are covert, and they want to persist.” Ms. Hawely said iSight is tracking approximately 30 threat groups with a Chinese nexus or base. She’s quick to add that China is not alone in the online espionage game. While data thieves might just want to get in and out of a system quickly and then move on, cyber-espionage groups often employ long-term tactics that mix tried-and-true tricks, such as spear-phishing, which is the use of spoofing emails, combined with newer techniques. Ms. Hawley cites one Chinese-nexus group that targeted defense industry conferences, then cross-referenced attendees with publicly available contact information to build a sophisticated spear-phishing campaign to use spoofing emails seeking personal data. “That led us to believe that they used these lists as a means to acquire targets, likely for their access to sensitive databases related to defense and aerospace technologies,” Ms. Hawley said. “We’ve seen multiple Chinese-nexus attacks like this targeting a variety of industries; we’ve also seen this from Russia.” Yet as troublesome as hacks like this can be, Ms. Hawley also points to another trend, one designed to confuse the target’s intelligence and scramble the lines between espionage and crime. A good example of this blurring came earlier this summer when iSight investigators started looking deeper into a group calling itself the Cyber Caliphate, a hacktivist group purportedly supporting the broad goals of the Islamic State extremist group. In February, Cyber Caliphate hackers created headlines when they temporarily seized control of the Twitter and YouTube accounts for the U.S. Central Command, posting incendiary threats and comments. Other targets, such as Newsweek magazine’s Twitter feed, were also briefly compromised. But Ms. Hawley says researchers at iSight Partners later unearthed evidence that the Cyber Caliphate wasn’t all it seemed. “We determined that they were a false front for Russian actors we called Tsar Team,” she said. “We began to see technical indicators that the two were sharing resources, and we determined that the two groups are either one in the same, or at the very least are connected by some over-arching organization.” Tsar Team is a Russian-based cyber-espionage group that earlier had targeted NATO, the Ukrainian government and the European Union using a zero-day vulnerability known as Sandworm. “Ultimately we determined that Tsar Team and the Cyber Caliphate were using the same infrastructure,” said Ms. Hawley. “That type of cover could give them the freedom to spread propaganda, test new hacking tools and techniques, and espionage campaigns down the road. But it also confuses efforts to determine actors and motivations.” And creating confusion in intelligence of just who is behind cyberattacks and what their motivations are only makes the difficult job of protecting sensitive computer networks from hackers harder still. |
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A.M. Costa Rica's Fifth news page |
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| San José, Costa Rica, Monday, Sept. 7, 2015, Vol. 16, No. 176 | |||||||
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| International report critical of Mexican student probe By the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
International experts reviewing the Mexican government's probe of the 2014 abduction and disappearance of 43 students have rejected the government's official narrative, accusing investigators of mishandling evidence and relying solely on statements from suspects. A more than 400-page analysis was released Sunday by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the autonomous rights arm of the Organization of American States. It does not speculate on the ultimate fate of the missing students, who disappeared one year ago in southern Mexico's Guerrero state. But it says there is no evidence supporting the government's central claim that the students were captured by local police and turned over to drug cartel assassins after commandeering buses for transportation to a protest. Under that theory, first presented late last year by Mexico's former attorney general, the bodies of the students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers College were dumped at a trash site and incinerated outside a nearby town. Sunday's report said the dump fire was not strong enough to burn the victims to ashes, and it said investigators from Chile, Colombia, Guatemala and Spain based that finding on independent expert analysis. The government had not commented on the report by late Sunday. The document says the students may have unwittingly hijacked a bus full of drugs or drug money that corrupt police were seeking to recover. It also says police and federal military units were tracking the movement of the students before they disappeared, while stressing that much of what occurred on Sept. 26, 2014 remains unknown. The report details missing evidence that includes a bus seen on security camera footage on the night of the disappearances. It also notes U.S. evidence that a drug gang in Guerrero state transports heroin to the United States in secret bus compartments. The government's failure to account for all but one of the students or to impress the Mexican public with the thoroughness of the probe has rattled the presidency of Enrique Peña Nieto and sparked widespread international criticism. Human rights activists and parents of the students continue to voice outrage that the investigation has been based on the testimony of more than 100 people arrested on suspicion of involvement in the disappearances. The detainees include the former mayor of the town of Iguala. Government critics also allege that many of the detainees gave statements to police only after undergoing torture. Hundreds of refugees reach Austria headed for Germany By the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
Europe is preparing for a new wave of refugees as word filters back to others that the passage through Hungary is now easier. Hundreds arrived Sunday at Vienna’s Westbahnhof station aboard trains from the Hungarian border, after officials in Hungary decided to allow thousands of refugees who had been stranded in Budapest to travel by train to the border. Trains carrying refugees from the Hungarian border town of Hegyeshalom were met by cheers and applause from Austrian onlookers waiting on the station platform. It was a far cry from their experience in Hungary, where police last week tear gassed the migrants and prevented them from reaching Austria. Thousands had camped at Budapest’s Keleti station as trash built up and portable toilets overflowed. By Sunday morning, most of the refugees had left the terminal. In Vienna, Austrian relief workers and other volunteers offered tea, cigarettes, candy, food, clothing and blankets to the migrants. Abdulmalik al Khaled, a medical student fleeing Syria, said he could not believe the warm welcome he received when he got off the train. “It is very, very, very good,“ he said, as he prepared to leave for Germany, where he hopes to get help from the German government to continue work on his medical degree. “If I don’t want to complete my studies, I want to stay here. But Germany may be better than here to complete studies, so I will travel to there. But it’s better here, in my opinion. Look, everybody is welcome in this country.” Some in Europe are expressing concerns that the massive influx of mostly Muslim refugees may dramatically change the demographics of their continent, where low birth rates suggest the native population is not due to replace itself in the next generation. Denise Neuhauser, a 30-year-old Austrian volunteer handing out candy on the station platform, said those are not immediate concerns. “I really don’t know what the bigger picture is, but right now, take care of the people, give them food, give them drink, give them shelter and let them pass through.” For most refugees arriving at the station Sunday, the passage was remarkably efficient, with Austrian police and railway workers helping the migrants transfer directly to another platform where they immediately boarded trains for Germany. Abdulmalik al Khaled and his cousins relaxed in a room next to the platform as they recharged their smart phones. One of the first calls he planned to make was to his cousin, who is making the same journey and is now waiting in Macedonia before seeing whether it is possible to make the trek through Serbia and then to cross to Hungary. “I tell him when he arrives here, here is better than any country. I will tell him that.” Hungarian leaders are expressing concern that the news of easier passage will encourage more migrants to make the journey and have been fortifying the fence along the border where most of the migrants have been entering illegally. Hundreds continued to cross the border from Serbia into Hungary on Sunday. Austria, meanwhile, said it planned to eventually phase out emergency measures that have made it possible for the migrants to cross the border from Hungary. "We have always said this is an emergency situation in which we must act quickly and humanely," Austrian Chancellor Werner Faymann said Sunday. "Now we have to move step-by-step away from emergency measures towards normality in conformity with the law and dignity." Faymann spoke Sunday with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who threw her country's doors wide open to the migrants, and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, whose government is building a razor wire fence along the Serbian border to keep the migrants out. Syrian refugees interviewed in Vienna overwhelmingly expressed a desire to go home, but said that will not be possible as long as the war between the government of Bashir al Assad and rebel groups continues. Abdulmalik al Khaled puts that responsibility on the United States. He had a message for U.S. President Barack Obama: “If you want to stop this problem, you have to stop the war. You can do that. I know that. You can.” Those sentiments were echoed by Duried Bawadkji a Syrian-born resident of Hungary who turned out at the Hegyeshalom border crossing between Hungary and Austria on Sunday to volunteer and help direct the migrants. He said the Obama administration’s support for democratic change in Arab countries has gone wrong. In Syria, he said, the so-called Arab Spring has brought tragedy. “They are the ones responsible of doing this. Because when you encourage people to go in the streets, either you go and help them and finish the story as you have done in too many countries, or don’t do anything like this. Just leave people alone. Leave it how it was.” Number of senators on fence reduced as Congress returns By the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
As U.S. lawmakers prepare to return to Washington from a month-long recess, a flurry of senators have announced their positions on the international nuclear accord with Iran. The pact has more than enough support to survive, but still lacks the backing required to prevent Congress from passing an initial resolution of disapproval. “Frankly, this is not the agreement I hoped for. I have serious concerns based on Iran’s past behavior of cheating on nuclear agreements," said Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware, a Democrat. He is not wildly enthusiastic about the Iran nuclear deal. But, like most Democrats, he supports it anyway. “We cannot trust Iran, but this deal, based on distrust, verification, deterrence, and strong, principled multilateral diplomacy, offers us the best opportunity to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon," he said. In recent days, five other Democratic senators issued similar statements of support despite misgivings. New Jersey's Cory Booker said “It is better to support a deeply flawed deal, for the alternative is far worse.” Mark Warner of Virginia said, “While I choose to support the deal, I am not satisfied with it.” Until Friday, only one Democrat, Chuck Schumer of New York, had announced opposition to the deal. Since then, he has been joined by Sens. Ben Cardin of Maryland and Robert Menendez of New Jersey. “We know that, despite the fact that Iran claims its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes, that they have violated the international will as expressed by various U.N. Security Council resolutions, and by deceit, deception and delay advanced their program to the point of being a threshold nuclear state," said Menendez. Given unified Republican opposition to the accord, all eyes are on the remaining handful of Democratic senators yet to announce. Already, there is ample backing to sustain President Barack Obama’s promised veto of a resolution of disapproval from Congress. The undecided senators will determine whether Senate action can be blocked altogether. “If that happens, the resolution of disapproval won’t reach the president’s desk, and there will be no need to exercise the veto. That’s a tough goal but a possible one," said former U.S. ambassador Norman Eisen of the Brookings Institution. An initial vote in the House of Representatives could come by week’s end. U.S. celebrates Labor Day as unemployment is lower By the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
Americans observe the Labor Day federal holiday today. U.S. President Barack Obama said in his weekly address Saturday that Labor Day is a day "we set aside every year to honor the hardworking men and women who fought for so many of the rights that we take for granted today." He said the people involved in the labor movement worked "not just for a bigger paycheck for themselves, but for more security and prosperity for the folks working next to them as well." He said, "That's how we built the great American middle class." Obama said "Over the past five and a half years, our businesses have created 13.1 million new jobs in total, the longest streak of job creation on record." In a report Friday from the Labor Department, the U.S. unemployment rate fell to the lowest level in seven-and-a-half years in August; 5.1 percent. That is a drop of two-tenths of a percent from the previous month. The Labor Department also said the economy had a net gain of 173,000 jobs, which is less than most economists had predicted. This report is a key part of the data that leaders of the U.S. central bank will consider as they decide how soon and how much to raise the benchmark interest rate. It has been at a record low level since 2008 in a bid to boost economic growth during and following the financial crisis. White House economic adviser Jason Furman said the economy gained 8 million jobs over the past three years, but warned it could face "headwinds" from the global economy. Texas hospital not ready for ebola, expert report says By the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
A hospital in the southern U.S. state of Texas was not prepared last year to treat the first person diagnosed with the ebola virus in the United States nor to ensure the safety of the two nurses who contracted the virus while treating the patient, according to a new report. In their report, a panel of independent experts said it was evident that personnel from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, plus federal and state officials, were learning alongside the actual health care providers at the Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas. The hospital’s parent group, Texas Health Resources, released the findings Friday. Thomas Eric Duncan, a Liberian émigré, initially sought treatment at the hospital’s emergency room Sept. 25 for a headache, nausea and extremely high temperature. He had arrived several days earlier from his native country, where he’d helped carry a woman infected with the disease. Duncan was sent home with antibiotics but returned three days later and was hospitalized. He died Oct. 8. "It is unclear why a patient who had developed a fever of 103 was not reexamined prior to discharge or whether the physician was advised or aware of the elevated temperature," the report said. The findings revealed that while information about Duncan's travel history to Africa was gathered by a nurse, it was not verbally communicated to a physician because the information had been entered into the electronic health record. "The health care team apparently relied too heavily on communication through the electronic health record," the panel said. The CEO of Texas Health Resources, which owns the Dallas hospital and 23 others in north Texas, said he welcomed the panel’s report. Barclay Berdan said he believes that it "will lead us to better diagnoses of diseases in our emergency rooms, better care for our patients overall, and better coordination with local, state and federal officials in the event another rare event like this unfolds." The hospital group already is utilizing measures recommended by the panel, it said. The panel report comes amid a lawsuit from Nina Pham, one of the infected nurses, the Associated Press reports. The suit alleges the hospital group failed to provide training and proper protective gear. "It does not appear that issues such as personal protective equipment, waste management and other challenges that would emerge as critical were addressed by CDC at the onset of this event," the report said. The findings said "health care workers had areas of exposed skin that were not fully covered or shielded," exposing them to massive and highly infectious fluids from Duncan. Nurse Pham and nurse Amber Vinson survived ebola. |
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| A.M. Costa Rica's sixth news page |
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Speedy bamboo
shoots for the sky
So, you planted some nice clumping bamboo and watched it race skyward. It is funny stuff, bamboo, but after all, it is a grass, no matter
With its height completed in about 4 months the wall of the stalk or clum hardens over the next two seasons and the bamboo is ready to harvest in its third year. After it reaches maturity, bamboo begins to accumulate a fungus and decays over the next few years. A life cycle of individual stalks is five to seven years. For use in construction or decoration, bamboo is usually harvested in that third year. And what are you going to do with all that bamboo? First, you will cut and dry it over several months. In Georgia's drier climate, my bamboo was subject to splitting as it dried/ this has not been a problem in our more humid climate although the bamboo needs to dry a bit longer. Then there is the cutting, traditionally done with a special saw that is used to cut only in one direction to reduce splintering. Then comes the peeling of the outer layer. I use a heavy knife and long strokes. Sanding follows. Without peeling and sanding, nothing you put on the bamboo will stick, not paint, not varnish. Paint, in particular, will look dull. Varnish will just peal off. Of course, if you are going to use your bamboo for construction and then discard it, you only need to cut and dry it first. Now, I am not a bamboo expert and I make no claim that this is all you need to know about bamboo. Far from it. There are nice thick books on growing and working bamboo. Find one at a bookstore or download one on your Kindle and go play with your bamboo. Why? Because it's fun! And isn't that what gardening is all about?
If you would like to suggest a topic for this column, simply send a letter to the editor. And, for more garden tips, visit https://www.facebook.com/pages/Arenal-Gardeners/413220712106845 |
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| From Page 7: G-20 ministers urge resisting protectionism By the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
Finance ministers and central bank chiefs from the Group of 20 leading economies say global growth is slower than they had expected, but they are confident that worldwide economic recovery will gain momentum. In the final communique of a two-day summit in the Turkish capital, Ankara, top finance officials from the G-20 nations promised Saturday to take decisive action to keep economic recovery upbeat. They also pledged to refrain from competitive currency devaluations, a reference to China's recent devaluation and a warning to emerging-market nations not to take similar action to protect their own currencies. Financial markets worldwide have been in turmoil for weeks due to concern about a slowdown in China's economy and its sudden devaluation of the yuan last month. Since currency devaluations effectively lower the price of a country's exports, there are concerns that China's devaluation may prompt other nations to take similar action. Beijing's monetary action already has driven down the value of many smaller countries' currencies. The G-20 vowed to resist all forms of protectionism. U.S. officials said the American delegation in Ankara, led by Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew, met with its Chinese counterpart on the sidelines of the summit. The U.S. side said it was important for China to make clear that it will allow the yuan to move up as well as down in response to financial markets. A senior U.S. Treasury official told reporters, "It would be a very bad thing for the global economy if we get into a pattern of competitive devaluation." During detailed discussions, the official said, all agreed that competitive devaluation is a threat that has to be guarded against. Another major theme at the G-20 meetings was the monetary policy of the U.S. Federal Reserve, which has been expected for months to lift interest rates to match the quickening pace of U.S. economic growth. Financial officials in many other countries are concerned that higher U.S. interest rates will persuade foreign investors to shift their capital into dollar-based funds and reduce financial liquidity, the supply of money available to fuel business growth. In line with the improving world economic outlook, the G-20 said a tightening of monetary policy through interest rate hikes is more likely in some advanced economies. However, the group urged central banks and governments not to rely heavily on interest rates alone, but also to practice fiscal policies that support growth and create jobs. The head of the International Monetary Fund, Christine Lagarde, told reporters Saturday that the U.S. Federal Reserve in particular should increase interest rates only when it is certain that all growth indicators dictate such a move. |
